"This volume is in part translation from the Arabic parables, in part written directly in English. A small book of only seventy pages, it is a product of the poet''s youth and early manhood, rich with promise of what was to follow. It is entirely of the East, with no shading of Western thought or content. It is an expression of the passionate inner life not yet restrained and controlled by the vaster wisdom andcompassion that came to bud in The Forerunner and to full flower in The Prophet . . .

"Here for the first time Gibran registers fully his sense of that aloneness which remained with him always, even unto the end. Always he was alien to this planet, to this time and this scene, yet always he battled to reduce this distance between himself and ourselves. But as he once said, ''Ye would not.''"

--Barbara Young, in This Man from Lebanon: A Study of Kahlil Gibran